The Ravestijn Gallery is proud to announce its participation in the second edition of NAP+, a dynamic art fair with a youthful edge, hosted for the first time at Amsterdam's newly redeveloped Centrale Markthal (September 11-14). Underpinned by a broad range of creative methodologies and conceptual engagements with photography, a selection of works by Scheltens & Abbenes, Blommers & Schumm and Vera van Dam come together in an exciting all Dutch group presentation.
For the artist duo Scheltens & Abbenes, photography is a playful tool for deconstruction and reconfiguration. Frequently, their visual experiments probe at the limits of spatial dimensions, flattening sculptural 3D forms - often household items or familiar consumer goods - into illusory 2D images. Devoted to the life and stories of everyday objects, the Amsterdam-based MacGuffin Magazine lists Scheltens & Abbenes among its long-term collaborators; for Issue #9, dedicated to 'The Rug', the duo sourced a series of stained carpets from a local thrift, applying a cleaning product to expose their hidden colours. In foaming waves and rippled brushstrokes, the resulting works cement the cleaning process as its own unique form of mark making, establishing new patterns and compositions in abstract, colourful photographs.
Like Scheltens & Abbenes, another artist duo - Blommers & Schumm - are best-known for collapsing creative boundaries, carving out new terrain between worlds of art, fashion and photography. From major commissions to personal work, Blommers & Schumm's visual signature takes shape through meticulously arranged compositions that seem to teeter on the edge of collapse, underlining the brevity of the moment of capture. With an early background in still-life photography, even their portraits carry the hallmarks of this genre; presented at NAP+, two impressions of David Hockney - one in colour, one in black and white - emerge from curated assemblages of static objects, from a length of tape to a paintbrush, a mop, a shoe or a bag.
Completing the group presentation is a series of images from Vera van Dam's poetic Dahlia project, which establishes a conceptual connection between the female body and the car - both as male lust objects and as the subject of endless advertisements. A muted palette of greys, whites and blues - evoking the sober upholstery and fittings of a vehicle - is set against stretches of human skin, establishing a point of connection between the car's chassis and the body's surface, protecting that which lies within from outside pressures. In their anonymity, van Dam's subjects are more easily objectified, providing subtle commentary on the enduring status of women in a masculine world and probing delicately at the forces that shape it.
What unites these three distinct artistic voices is a shared fascination with the object - not merely as subject matter, but as a site of transformation, narrative, and formal exploration. Whether through the surreal reconfigurations of Scheltens & Abbenes, the poised tensions of Blommers & Schumm, or the poetic, symbolic pairings in Vera van Dam's work, each artist engages with the still life tradition in ways that are both contemporary and deeply considered. Together, the presentation at NAP+ highlights how the inanimate, when viewed through these artists' lenses, becomes charged with meaning - sculptural, political, and personal.
Please contact The Ravestijn Gallery should you like to receive more information or if you would like to acquire one of these pieces.
